How to Add Gray, Dark & Creepy Effects to Your Art Coloring Posters

You can add gray, dark and creepy effects to your art color posters in a wide variety of different ways depending on your preferences. Add gray, dark and creepy effects to your art color posters with help from a graphic designer and illustrator in this free video clip.

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Video Transcript

Hey everybody, this is Gene. I'm a Graphic Designer and Illustrator. I've been working in the industry for about 15 years. And today, we're going to take a look at some different color choices; we're going to take a look at how you can add gray, dark and creepy coloring to your art color posters. So, let's just get jump right in and get started. So, as you're, you're coloring your art posters, you can very easily give a real creepy mood to anything that you're working on. And one of the secrets is you want to start off with a little bit of a, a more colorful color like a blue, green or red. And choose one of those colors or one of, whatever color you're working with, it could be, you know, a nice bright purple, it could be an orange and in one of those colors, you want to make sure that whatever is in the foreground is that color because you want to, to make it stand out and, and actually have a focus to your piece. And the way that we're going to create the mood here is by putting the foreground against that moodier background. And as you can see here for this particular piece, you know, it's just something real basic; it's a, it's a quick little abstract of, not work piece, fairly common in, in, you know, art posters. So, here's what we're going to do, grab your grays and here I have two different shades of gray and you want to try and create a nice subtle wash from start to finish. So, I'm going to start on the right hand side here and be careful that you, you stay in the lines and I'm just going to go over one time. You can see I'm just doing one quick line, I'm not going back and forth, I'm just doing one line and fill in the whole area if you can. And it's going to start to give this a, a more creepy darker gray effect. Again, just make sure you get, you get all in the lines there. So, you're going to start out with the dark and on the other side, I'm going to start out with a little bit of lighter gray and overtime, I'm going to, I think it's important here that you just use one stroke, you don't want to go overboard and the reason we do that is so that when we get into the middle area, we can start to blend them together. Okay. So, here, I'm just going to flip this over and show you a quick little blending technique. So, here we've got one color and here I am going back and forth and you can see there's a little bit of texture underneath my paper. And then, what you're going to do is from the opposite side; so, if we're to flip this paper back over, remember I started on two sides, from the opposite side, you're going to start with the other color. And as you can see, this is the darker one and you're going to just fade it slightly in, real slow into your original color. So, here we can back this up a layer a little bit, we come over this second time to darken it in 'cause as you can see, there's still a bunch of white streaks in there and we don't want white streaks, we want to give it a nice solid color; and just pull it straight in. Now, what this is going to do is it's going to lift up a little bit of color from that other marker and it's going to start to blend the two colors together. And that's alright if there's a little bit of line work in there, just make sure that all of your lines are going the same way. Remember, concentrate on proper technique. And you can see how, how much darker this is getting now. And just start to pick them more up towards the end again because the darker color, a little bit of dark color goes a long way. And it's real easy to have it overpowered with lighter color. Then, I would just come back in with a lighter color and again, this is going to be really wet here, you're going to start to get a blending of the colors and you just go over each color it, each color with the other color several times until you have a nice gradation across the entire piece. Alright, so that was a little bit of the creepier side, a little bit of the darker side of coloring that you can add to your art color posters. Hope you learn something and we'll see you next time.